The man kept groaning. His wife whispered to him to keep still, but his pains were probably so great that he could not understand what she said. I lit the gas and approached the bed. A strong odour of putrefaction compelled me to withdraw, and the next moment the wife told me that he had a cancer, that he had been operated upon several times without success and that he now suffered the most excruciating pains; that the doctor came only once in two days, only to have a look--"to see if he is already dead," as she put it.
"Why don't you send him to the Skin and Cancer Hospital?" I asked.
"We are only two years in this country," was the woman's reply, "and they will send us back to Russia."
"He has been there twice--they operated on him."
"Well, well," I urged, "why does he not stay there?"
The man groaned, the woman cried, some sick child in the neighbourhood woke with the noise and mixed his sickly crying with theirs and the moaning of the wind outside. It was a pitiful scene. I started my interrogation.
The man was a musician, a fiddler. He was not a member of the Union. He had been in America two years, and sick from the first moment he had come. "And how do you get along?" I asked. "From where do you get money for bread?" Again the woman cried. Soon the man fell asleep. I heard his heavy breathing and felt the odour of putrefaction emanating from his body. Pitilessly I insisted on getting an answer to my question: "From what do you live?"
"There was not a piece of bread in the house to-day," was the answer.
"Yes, but where did you get yesterday's bread?"
"We had no coals for the last four days."
"But from where did you get it before that?" I argued.
"From--from--from the charity," the woman broke down hysterically.
The two folding beds in the kitchen attracted my attention and I asked her whether she had any boarders. This was the touchstone of her suffering. We drew our chairs away as far as possible from the sick bed and there she told me.
"These are not boarders' beds. They are the beds of my two daughters, Amy eighteen years old and Leah twenty--two daughters have I, like two flowers. Envied by the whole world. I was the proudest mother. Well, I'll tell you the whole story.